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Thursday, October 11, 2012

Autumn Harvest

Welcome back to another episode of Lost In The Farmer’s
Market where we at the test gardens look into another one of the horticultural
issues of the day. Today however the conversation is about winter preparations
and cold season produce. Our gardener friends up north have already seen 40
degree temperatures and we in the south know the temperature is soon to start
dropping and say low. So what is a gardener to do about the theoretical
bleakness of winter? Well the answer is clear, now is the time to get those
last additions to the garden in the ground. Last week we covered the things you
might want to consider when planting but I don’t think we covered it all so
today we are going to cover that but first a slight note about the plants of
note and an important update.

SECOND EDITION IS AVAILABLE!

You know what’s funny, under the guise of company supply
inspection I get to travel the state looking into what’s new. About half the
time the plant geek in me wins out and I have to explain why I bought to much
of this and that and thus, often some portion of my own pay is in plants. Those
outside the gardening zone would call this crazy but you know, getting a new
plant, seeing it succeed and then passing the cuttings on to others is the real
reward of this job. Seeing another gardener’s face light up as they realize
that this plant is the thing they wanted but never knew existed is what makes
every penny, and every minute worth it. Today I have three plants in their
absolute best for your viewing enjoyment. Two of the plants I have spoke of
before but lacked good images to show you. The other plant is new but I think
you will enjoy it.

Solanum quitoense
– Bed of Nails

I once joked that the bed of nails is the exact plant you place under your teenage daughter's bed room window to ward off unwanted suitors, and now you see why. This member of the Nightshade family is made of thorns, and only gets worse once it dies as the thorns get harder and puncture clothing more readily. The fruit is edible and is said to have a pleasant citrus flavor. It's cousin, the Devil's Thorn may or may not bear edible fruit but does have bright orange-red spines and both are excellent low-care plants.

Heurnia zebrina –
Life Saver Plant

Also here is a close up picture of a bloom from a life saver
plant, its bloom was covered over the winter of 2012 but the plant was refusing
to cooperate. As you can see it got its name for the red ring which is about
the same size as the candy, not the floatation device. One of the things to remember when you have these guys is to
water sparingly! They hate wet feet and will get rot at a glance especially
during the winter so lay off on water in general. For note, these are related to stapellia, which is known as carrion flower but life saver plant does not have any aroma at all.

Cyrtomium falcatum
Rochfordianum - Japanese Holly Fern

For a real-life view of these guys check the Fayetteville
Technical Community College main campus, these ferns are tucked into corners
all over the place. They handle traffic abuse, neglect and sun rather well. As
for your own use treat them as somewhat hardier then average ferns and give
them semi-shade or sun with morning or afternoon shade and make sure to enrich
the soil then are to live in moderately before planting. These ferns are
semi-evergreen depending on exposure.

This is a picture of the sweet potato bed, as you can see
it’s a brick-walled raised bed. The bed’s total height is 14” tall and is 1’ 4”wide
by 4’ 6” long. At the start of this year four sweet potato tubers totaling 10
ounces were planted in the sides while one 3 ounce Jerusalem Artichoke tuber
was planted in the center.

In the case of the test gardens our tuber beds are designed
to be long and narrow with the bricks being laid dry without any mortar. As
shown in the picture it facilitates harvesting, basically our first step is to
lay out a tarp to catch spilled soil, and then remove the bricks in one side of
the wall revealing the soil within.

The second step is to cut away any above-ground vegetative
growth and remove any anti-critter protections. In our case we lay bits of
chicken wire over the bed and leave them there over the season until harvest.
The sweet potatoes can grow right through the wire and so can the artichokes
but squirrels can’t get at your tubers after planting. Once the top-growth and
protections are gone you are free to dig gently with a trowel for your tubers.

This is an image of the excavated Jerusalem Artichoke‘s
tubers before the dirt is shaken off, as you can see the tubers radiate outward
neatly from the central mass but need a lot of cleaning.

This is the resulting tuber harvest after the bulk of the
soil is shaken off, as you can see there is a marked difference in yields
between the two tuber crops. I’ll note the results a b it later but, the
cleaning of the tubers is more about shaking and gently brushing off the
obvious dirt. If you try to grow tuber crops you will have to wash them with
water after to get all the soil and grit off.

At the test gardens we run a 365 day production schedule,so the tuber bed come October and after the
harvest is converted into a cold-seasonal bed. The bricks are replaced and 4”
of removed soil is returned to the bed. After the soil is replaced, a light
layer of poultry manure is added and then another 2” of excavated soil. This
process is repeated until the soil level is close to the original depth before
the harvest.

The final phase in this operation is to plant the actual
cold crops. In this case we have four red cabbage plants, which are one of the
many cold crops grown in the test gardens.

It is very important to note that crop rotation is very
important, monoculture or the intentional cultivation of the same crop in one
area over a long period is generally a bad idea as most of our common food
plants are being grown outside of their native regions. The perpetual
propagation of a single crop depletes the soil over time and promotes the
arrival of specific diseases and pests that can hurt your yield over time. I
rotate crop positions and types multiple times in every year this process is as
much to lower pest problems as is it is to test out new plant varieties that
come to my attention. Last year the cold crop was Cabbage-Collards which
performed incredibly, before that it was lettuce, next year I’m considering
beets, Chard or heirloom carrots. As a final note the chicken wire protections
were replaced temporarily until I could get some pine straw. Both work equally
well but I prefer using longleaf pine straw as it lasts longer, seems to keep
weeds down and of course as the property has five white pines, one loblolly and
a longleaf pine most of our straw is home grown.

As a final note for this incredibly late post, in the tuber
trials of 2012, Jerusalem Artichokes were the clear winner, in productivity,
drought resistance and auxiliary advantages (food for pollinators). At a glance
here are the harvest results:

| Crop| # | ST Wgt.| Harvest weight |

================================================

| Sweet Potato | 4
|10 ounces | 3lbs, 15oz|

| J. Artichoke | 1 |
3 ounces | 5lbs, 13oz|

================================================

For comparison last year the sweet potatoes produced 7.5
pounds of tubers, using three seed tubers weighing 4 ounces each which amounts
to 10 ounces of produce per 1 ounce of seed tuber. In a nutshell maybe this
year’s sweet potato crop had a bad year, but, it is clear for the virtues of a
lack of maintenance ease of propagation that the Jerusalem Artichoke is at
least at this moment superior in sheer volume of food production. For
cultivation purposes it is important to note that each sunchoke seed tuber has
the potential to produce upwards of 200 new tubers in a given six-month growing
year. In our case it produced 113 new tubers assuming we harvested all of them.
It is very important to grow this crop in high raised beds or in large pots
such as half-whiskey barrels. The one problem with the Jerusalem Artichoke is
it’s potential to get loose of the fields that grow it and become a problem.
While it isn’t nearly as bad as some species of mint or bamboo, it can become a
problem warranting multiple uses of herbicide in the warmer climates.

At the least it warrants a new test for next year and, as
soon as I have some good recipes for you I’ll post them up here.

As one of my landscaping clients mentioned, there was at one
point a scam going around where farmers were persuaded to invest in planting
Jerusalem Artichokes as the hunger-ending crop of the future. In theory given
the care and culture requirements this could be true in other parts of the
world. In the USA however, it is a specialty and or luxury item seen in places
like Whole Foods, Kings and, Harris Teeter type supermarkets. My own seed tuber
came from a package of tubers bought at the latter supermarket for 5.00 a pound
before taxes. Basically there is a market for this crop, but it’s a luxury item
not unlike Shitake mushrooms, black radishes and all the Asian-type cabbages.
It is my thought that growing this crop for production means that it would need
to be sold through unique margins such as farmer’s Markets or high-end
supermarkets. The regular supermarkets such as Aldi’s, Pathmark, Food Lion,
IGA, Stop & Shop, A&P and so on all might follow in the trend later but
not yet.

As a final note, why would one want to eat a Jerusalem
artichoke? The answer lay in its unique composition. The Jerusalem Artichoke is
a member of the sunflower family and is known by it’s Latin name Helianthus tuberosus. The tubers when
sliced thin can add extra flavor to salads, while if steamed are as good as
potatoes with pepper salt and butter. Given the type of carbohydrates it is
important to note that it takes less cooking to prepare Jerusalem artichokes in
general and they require no peeling which makes for an interesting variant on
mashed potatoes. In terms of flavor, the Jerusalem Artichoke is sweeter, and
has a nutty flavor in comparison to white potatoes but to the unknowing, this
may not be noticed as the tuber itself but the seasonings.

So this tops off another episode of Lost in the farmer’s
Market. Our next episode covers the process of bed merging, we will have
step-by-step photographic instructions on what it takes to combine existing
beds.Also remember, you have roughly
three more weeks to get your cold crops in the ground so if you want cold
season plants don’t dawdle the weather is already acting up.

BL2inc

Thomas Clark is the proprietor of Bordeaux Light Landscaping, which is located in fayetteville North Carolina. He is currently working towards a degree in Horticultural technology and has more then thirteen years of field experience in landscaping and horticulture. The latest thing to add onto this is the recent publishing of a book, 'Southward Skies: A Northern Guide to Southern Gardening' which is a reasonably priced but comprehensive easy to read gardening book about all things verticulture.